Show Review: Beriut, w/ Colleen + Alaska in Winter, 10/8/07

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Show Review: Beriut, w/ Colleen + Alaska in Winter, 10/8/07

I gave Beirut's newest album, The Flying Cup Club,the thumbs up in our October issue, so last night I headed on down to the beautiful Herbst Theater here in San Francisco to check out their first of two nights performing here. They put on an amazing show, with their cabaret sound booming around the antique theater and a crowd that went absolutely *merde de singe *(thanks, Babel Fish!) for it all. A rundown of the show, a few more pics, and the rest of the tour dates after the jump.

Beirut started as the project of Zach Condon, a kid from Santa Fe who did some traveling in Europe before sitting down to pen some Eastern European-tinged tunes, aided by two people from another New Mexico band, A Hawk and a Hacksaw. Those songs turned into Gulag Orkestar, which gained bunches of of buzz among the music blogs last year. It's well-deserved hype – Condon manages to twist up folk and Balkan music together in a unique but still very, very catchy way. His new album is has a fuller band and is more French, sounding a lot like Yann Tiersen, but it's equally as good. His voice is a huge baritone, heavy on the vibrato, and the music itself can feel a bit florid – it's definitely not to everyone's liking (e.g. the editor here at Wired, in a note sent back after I turned in a positive review: "Okay,I just have one question: This album didn’t annoy you AT ALL?") and, okay, yes, I get the urge to throw on some Replacements or Lil' Wayne after listening to too much of it, but overall Beirut produces fun, melodramatic pomp.

Opening for them last night were two solo acts, Alaska in Winter and Colleen. Alaska in Winter isBrandon Bethancourt, who does downbeat pop tunes with lots and lots and lots of vocoder. He came out on stage in a huge gray Cossack hat as a prerecorded video of him playing every part of every song went up behind him. There were synchronized costume changes that were neat to watch (i.e. when Bethancourt took off his jacket, all the prerecorded video versions of himself took off the jacket as well), and he has a Beck-ish way of sketching out charming white-guy funk moves while performing, but it was still hard to overlook that we were essentially watching a guy sing vocoder along to prerecorded music.

Next up was Colleen, aka Cécile Schott, a French musician who does some pretty amazing things with delay pedals. She played four songs, two on cello, one on clarinet, and one on guitar, in which she would lay down an initial melody, loop it, and then slowly build a wall of sound on top of that. People messing with delay pedals isn't exactly unique (Keller Williams, Andrew Bird, and Beirut co-collaborator Owen Pallet of Final Fantasy are among many), but Schott aims less for creating songs, and more for creating textures. Like Phillip Glass at his thickest, Schott takes simple things and winds them all together to make them beautifully complex. The audience seemed split down the middle, some loving it and some leaving to catch pre-Beirut cigarettes. My favorite part was her work on guitar, starting with a carefully picked opening loop on the strings beyond the bottom of the guitar's bridge that sounded exactly like a music box, until Schott reversed the loop, creating strange drops of high pitched noise, on top of which she layered guitar chord after guitar chord. After admitting this was her first time in San Francisco and that the Herbst was the nicest venue she'd ever played, to a burst of warm-hearted applause, it was time for Beirut.

Beirut immediately launched into "Nantes" from their new album, and the most obvious thing about them hits almost immediately: they're fucking loud. The drums that scatter around the background of songs on the album carom off your chest and ears live, and the extensive brass section is anything but subtle. Condon's voice remains huge live and all the instruments remained centered around him, and after some what seemed to be some initial EQ problems (the double bass was nearly buried underneath all the noise at first), the sound was some of the best I've heard anywhere. With eight people on stage at once, it would be surprising if the band *didn't *manage to recreate the dense orchestration heard on the album, but it was still gratifying to hear the same small touches live on tracks like "Cherbourg" that made them so enjoyable over headphones. Not surprisingly, considering the new album was released today, the crowd was most enthusiastic about songs from the first album (though the enthusiastic response "In the Mausoleum" and "A Sunday Smile" both got during their opening bars suggests that some in attendance may have, gasp, downloaded leaked copies of the album). After closing with "The Penalty," the band took the stage after a standing ovation (which actually meant something, since nearly everyone had been sitting down until then), and played three more songs. For the final song, Condon alone remained on stage, tuning a ukulele, before launching into a solo cover of the Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." When Condon froze for a moment, breaking into laughter because he'd forgotten some of the words, the crowd warmly laughed along with him, but it was still a moving cover of a great song.

A lot of times, you can go see live music and find yourself suddenly thinking about whether you remembered to pay the cable bill, or if your roommates are gonna eat that half of a burrito you left in the fridge, or whether it's time for a haircut or not. Watching Beirut was not like that. It was watching a group of people enjoying themselves immensely, in front of a crowd that was doing the same. If you're reading this and you live in San Francisco, they're playing again tonight – the show is sold out, but Craigslist, as always, has some options open. If not, welp, hope you live in LA or in Europe, 'cause that's where they're going next. If you get a chance, give them a shot.